It has been mentioned to me that BT are going to remove the Light User Scheme (LUS) and In-Contact Plus (ICR).  They will be replaced by BT Basic, as follows:-

BT Basic

You can only be on it if you have one of the following 3 benefits:-
1) Job Seekers Allowance
2) Income Support
3) Guaranteed State Pension

Receipt of the above will have to be proved.

The cost is £14.49 a quarter (minus £3 if paid via D/D) and includes 45 mins of calls a quarter. Calls over the 45 mins are at 10p/min any time of the day or night.

This is coming into play in January sometime but people will be able to keep the old tariffs for a while as they are migrated over.

I presume it will still have the same restrictions as the Light User Scheme, i.e. the customer is not eligible if he/she has any "broadband" or any mobile phone or anyone else in the house has another telephone line.

acezing wrote on Jan 1^st, 2007 at 9:50am:



Nope, it is replacing the LUS and ICP totally. People will be slowly transfered over.
And yeah, the same restrictions apply as the LUS: no mobile, no BB, no prefix codes, no CPS ect.

Yep, at least according to the training we got on it last week.

How are BT going to find out about your broadband rental or mobile ownership?
Surely they can't make you tell them as it is personal info, and if they investigated via the various suppliers their enquiries should be met with the Data Protection wall.
You would then use the voip callback service.

And how the heck did DWP get the right to give out our info freely? Can I ring them to ask if my potential customer can afford my services before I offer them?

Supposing you were in a shared house, but without permission to use the other tenant's phone / computer / other equipment. How would you stand then?

a very nice man wrote on Jan 10^th, 2007 at 6:11pm:


They can't find out about you owning a Pay As You Go mobile in any practical terms, especially if you haven't registered it as you are legally allowed not to.  Also anyone who is JobSeeking is never going to get a bloody job these days if they don't have broadband and a computer - what a farce.

Knowing you have got broadband on the line is easy as long as BT are allowed to get access to BT OpenReach's records of which lines are tagged for BT Wholesale broadband or LLU broadband.  Also given what good friends BT has at Ofcom and how anti privacy protection New Labour in general are no doubt they have or will be allowed such access.

The outrage is that for gas and electricity if you have a cottage in Snowdonia that is only occupied 20 days a year then loads of gas and electricity companies have a no standing charge tariff that makes no stipulations at all about who you are or your income.

It is outrageous that BT Wholesale, who have a de facto monopoly in rural areas on line rental because they either sell to you via BT or via another company they sell the WLR line to, are not forced to come up with a product for people who do not make phone calls and only need the line for broadband and Voip.  Instead we are forced to subsidise lower cost prices for BT Option 2 and Option 3 customers with our outraegous £33 a quarter BT No Option 1 line rental for maintaining a years old copper wire and line card.

a very nice man wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 9:53pm:


I think the point is they require you to sign a statement saying you don't have broadband access.

If you aren't with BT chances are they won't catch you but you could always talk about it at the pub and then a friend who has a grudge against you may tip the off BT's Investigations department.  And they are probably going to take out one or two example prosecutions against well off techno geeks like you who are well outside the profile they had in mind for helping the technologically illiterate and impoverished (you seem to have to be both to qualify for this scheme).

So BT come out with a new scheme for poor people and it still assumes having broadband isn't essential for the poor - now how does that stop social exclusion?

gt94sss2 wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 3:56am:


Please do tell me what that tariff is and provide a URL to it.

Quote:


Let me put it another way.  BT Option 1 customers are charged violently over the odds so as to blackmail us into routing all our calls with BT on Options 2 and 3 instead where the price differential to Option 1 is now much smaller.  Since BT is still the massively dominant market player how can Ofcom justify a situation where BT now finds it much easier to talk more customers into not leaving it.

Also how does BT justify the poor who use computers having to pay a whopping £132 a year to BT just so they then have a line that can take a broadband connection with further fees on top?  There is no competition to BT Wholesale/Openreach outside of cable and fully LLU exchange phone areas.